XFX HD7850 Black Edition Review

Last week we reviewed the excellent Sapphire HD7850 Overclock Edition and XFX have sent us their competing part – the XFX HD7850 Black Edition. This card features a even higher overclock, to 975mhz on the core with a custom two fan metal cooling solution. The big question, is this better than the Sapphire solution?

XFX and Sapphire have been head to head in battle for the last year, targeting various sectors with custom, overclocked graphics cards. The XFX HD7850 Black Edition looks a little more exciting than the HD7870 Black Edition we reviewed last week thanks to more daring core overclock speeds.

XFX are keen to highlight their ‘Ghost Thermal technology’.

What is this? Well XFX say “Through rigorous testing and analysis we have discovered the optimal thermal design that allows air to pass through the heatsink directly to the PCB and core components. Older enclosed designs often trapped the heat, creating a bottle neck at the exhaust, this can be remedied but at the cost of a higher fan speed which creates excess noise. Our design allows us to keep the fan speeds lower while allowing the heat to dissipate evenly throughout the card.”

Product

AMD HD7970

AMD HD7950

AMD HD7870

XFX HD7850 BE

Core Clock speed

925mhz

800mhz

1000mhz

860mhz (975mhz)

Transistors

4.31 billion

4.31 billion

2.8 billion

2.8 billion

Stream Processors

2,048

1,792

1,280

1,024

Compute Performance

3.79 TFLOPS

2.87 TFLOPS

2.56 TFLOPS

1.76 TFLOPS

Texture Units

128

112

80

64

Texture Fillrate

118.4 GT/s

89.6 GT/s

80 GT/s

55.0 GT/s

ROPs

32

32

32

32

Pixel Fillrate

29.6 GP/s

25.6 GP/s

32.0 GP/s

27.52 GP/s

Z/Stencil

128

128

128

128

Memory Type

3GB GDDR5

3GB GDDR5

2GB GDDR5

2GB GDDR5

Memory Clock

1,375mhz

1,250mhz

1,200mhz

1,200mhz (1,250mhz)

Memory Data Rate

5.5 GBps

5.0 Gbps

4.8 Gbps

4.8 Gbps (5.0Gbps)

Memory Bandwidth

264 GB/s

240 GB/s

153.6 GB/s

153.6 GB/s

XFX have opted for a generous 115mhz overclock on the core, raising the speed from 860mhz to 975mhz, this should have a dramatic impact on the overall performance. The 2GB of GDDR5 memory has been overclocked by 50mhz from 1,200mhz to 1,250mhz (from 4.8Gbps to 5.0Gbps effective).

Check Also

The HTC VIVE Pro is on the way, bringing along a 78 percent increase in resolution, a more comfortable mounting mechanism and integrated audio. It even takes over the base Vive's original launch price of £799